While both Karl Marx and Malthus accepted many of the views of the classical economists, Marx was harshly and implacably critical of Malthus and his ideas. The vehemence of the assault was remarkable. Marx reviled Malthus as a “miserable parson” guilty of spreading a “vile and infamous doctrine, this repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.” For Marx, only under capitalism does Malthus’ dilemma of resource limits arise. Though differing in many respects from the utopians who had provoked Malthus’ rejoinder, Marx shared with them the view that any number of people could be supported by a properly organized society. Under the socialism favoured by Marx, the surplus product of labour, previously appropriated by the capitalists, would be returned to its rightful owners, the workers, thereby eliminating the cause of poverty. Thus Malthus and Marx shared a strong concern about the plight of the poor, but they differed sharply as to how it should be improved. For Malthus the solution was individual responsibility as to marriage and childbearing; for Marx the solution was a revolutionary assault upon the organization of society, leading to a collective structure called socialism.

The strident nature of Marx’s attack upon Malthus’ ideas may have arisen from his realization that they constituted a potentially fatal critique of his own analysis. “If [Malthus’] theory of population is correct,” Marx wrote in 1875 in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (published by Engels in 1891), “then I cannot abolish this [iron law of wages] even if I abolish wage-labor a hundred times, because this law is not only paramount over the system of wage-labor but also over every social system.”

The anti-Malthusian views of Marx were continued and extended by Marxians who followed him. For example, although in 1920 Lenin legalized abortion in the revolutionary Soviet Union as the right of every woman “to control her own body,” he opposed the practice of contraception or abortion for purposes of regulating population growth. Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, adopted a pronatalist argument verging on the mercantilist, in which population growth was seen as a stimulant to economic progress. As the threat of war intensified in Europe in the 1930s, Stalin promulgated coercive measures to increase Soviet population growth, including the banning of abortion despite its status as a woman’s basic right. Although contraception is now accepted and practiced widely in most Marxist-Leninist states, some traditional ideologists continue to characterize its encouragement in Third-World countries as shabby Malthusianism.

Charles Darwin, whose scientific insights revolutionized 19th-century biology, acknowledged an important intellectual debt to Malthus in the development of his theory of natural selection. Darwin himself was not much involved in debates about human populations, but many who followed in his name as “social Darwinists” and “eugenicists” expressed a passionate if narrowly defined interest in the subject.

In Darwinian theory the engine of evolution is differential reproduction of different genetic stocks. The concern of many social Darwinists and eugenicists was that fertility among those they considered the superior human stocks was far lower than among the poorer—and, in their view, biologically inferior—groups, resulting in a gradual but inexorable decline in the quality of the overall population. While some attributed this lower fertility to deliberate efforts of people who needed to be informed of the dysgenic effects of their behaviour, others saw the fertility decline itself as evidence of biological deterioration of the superior stocks. Such simplistic biological explanations attracted attention to the socioeconomic and cultural factors that might explain the phenomenon and contributed to the development of the theory of the demographic transition.

Theory of the demographic transition

The classic explanation of European fertility declines arose in the period following World War I and came to be known as demographic transition theory. (Formally, transition theory is a historical generalization and not truly a scientific theory offering predictive and testable hypotheses.) The theory arose in part as a reaction to crude biological explanations of fertility declines; it rationalized them in solely socioeconomic terms, as consequences of widespread desire for fewer children caused by industrialization, urbanization, increased literacy, and declining infant mortality.

The factory system and urbanization led to a diminution in the role of the family in industrial production and a reduction of the economic value of children. Meanwhile, the costs of raising children rose, especially in urban settings, and universal primary education postponed their entry into the work force. Finally, the lessening of infant mortality reduced the number of births needed to achieve a given family size. In some versions of transition theory, a fertility decline is triggered when one or more of these socioeconomic factors reach certain threshold values.

Until the 1970s transition theory was widely accepted as an explanation of European fertility declines, although conclusions based on it had never been tested empirically. More recently careful research on the European historical experience has forced reappraisal and refinement of demographic transition theory. In particular, distinctions based upon cultural attributes such as language and religion, coupled with the spread of ideas such as those of the nuclear family and the social acceptability of deliberate fertility control, appear to have played more important roles than were recognized by transition theorists.

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